AMD FX-8320E Performance On Linux

For this FX-8320E review, its performance was compared to the:

- AMD FX-8150
- AMD FX-8370E
- Intel Core i3 4130
- Intel Core i5 4670
- Intel Core i7 4790K

The MSI 970 Gaming motherboard was used when testing all of the AMD CPU samples while an ASRock Z97 Extreme6 board was used with the Intel Haswell processors. Common components used throughout testing was 2 x 4GB of AMD Radeon DDR3-2133MHz memory, AMD Radeon R9 290 GPU, and 64GB OCZ Agility SSD. The software stack was based on Ubuntu 14.10 x86_64 with the Linux 3.16 kernel, GCC 4.9.1, EXT4 file-system, and manually installing the Catalyst 14.12 Omega Linux graphics driver.

When it came to overclocking the FX-8320E, I was able to push this eight-core CPU to 4.4~4.5GHz on simple air cooling before running into stability issues. With water cooling and more time spent testing the voltages, it's probably quite possible to push the FX-8320E further, but for this article when running the overclocked results I simply left it at 4.4GHz.

All of the benchmarks in this article were run via the open-source Phoronix Test Suite benchmarking software for complete reproducibility and automation of these Linux tests. First up are the raw performance results for the tested CPUs followed by some thermal and power consumption/efficiency results.